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If there's one thing Brian Sigafoos loves as much as sports,
it's software. A 6'10" former professional basketball player, he's
managed to combine his two favorite pasttimes by moving to Dubai in
2008 to join Duplays, the online platform that connects with
organized sports events.

In an effort to reach new markets, Duplays is now packaging its
software under the name Playpass, and marketing the platform to all sport
organizers big and small. While Duplays is now pursuing a
franchise model with 5 locations so far (Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Doha,
Amman, and Gurgaon, India), Playpass is aiming to sign up
thousands of sport organizers and so far has
fourteen. Sigafoos will serve as its CEO.

Founded in 2007 by Ravi Bhusari and Derv Rao, two friends who
rejected the ideas that making friends in Dubai required an
unhealthy, party-heavy lifestyle, Duplays has grown exponentially since then, from 20
Ultimate Frisbee players in Dubai to over 50,000 members playing
over 20 sports in its five cities.

As the company has grown, it has evolved from online portal to
software platform. “We kept building tools for us to organize
sports as efficiently as possible – online payments, managing
rosters, financial reporting, communicating with members on a
platform we built from scratch internally,” Sigafoos explains. Now,
the team is releasing Playpass software in response to popular
demand: “Groups kept coming to ask how to use our platform; instead
of advertising, we wanted to give our platform to others to use,”
he says.

Its success will depend upon the popularity of sports worldwide.
According to Sigafoos, the fact that Duplays survived Dubai’s 2008
economic crash speaks to the fact that sports and fitness are “not
a fad,” and that people will want to work out no matter what the
state of the economy or their finances.

He also expects a global love of sports to overcome the hurdles
that franchisees could face when trying to popularize sports
communities in regional markets that aren’t as heavily populated by
expats. Duplays, thus far, has been something of an
expatriate-friendly brand: expats founded it in Dubai, and its
success has largely been driven by the healthy habits of young,
active people living away from home in the UAE.

Duplays Amman, which launched a few weeks ago, will be a
good testing ground for its expansion beyond an expatriate market.
While it’s too early to measure its success, Sigafoos says, he’s
confident that, with the right marketing, the model will thrive in
the right cities – those with more than one million people, high
purchasing power, and a population interested in playing
sports.

Thus far, Playpass has 14 sport organizers on board, including 5
Duplays franchises, which it's supporting with continuous
improvements. Duplays will “aggressively add new features [to
Playpass] to help them run their businesses better," says Sigafoos.
“We recently overhauled the way each organizer’s homepage looks
based on their feedback. We included more text description, maps,
contact information, and a fresher design," and more is on the way,
he adds.

Another key element for scaling the business is ensuring that
new users can easily join and start playing. “Everyone will be able
to post one event online for free,” says Sigafoos, in hopes that
they’ll like the experience so much that they’ll come back for
more. “We want to be as inclusive as possible,” he adds.

Whether Duplays’ success can be replicated in cities without
large expat markets is yet to be seen – but exercise is more
popular than ever, as are online forums for finding and organizing
local events. Playpass, and its towering CEO, are betting that the
combination of the two will be a slam dunk.